"What a wonderful mix of scholarship and feeling! With insight and sympathy, Barbara Katz Rothman shows us how the new techniques for diagnosing fetal health problems confront pregnant women with new burdens and responsibilities. Anyone who thinks that prenatal diagnosis is liberating for women needs to read this book." -Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology, Harvard University
Provides expert help you need to make difficult bio-ethical decisions, covering a broad range of current and future health care issues, as well as institutional and social issues applicable to multiple disciplines and settings.
A dramatic and carefully detailed account of one family's journey through the maze of genetic counseling, medical technology, and disability rights; destined to become required reading for anyone touched by any of these issues.
There are people dedicated to improving the way we eat, and people dedicated to improving the way we give birth. This title compares these two social movements and brings insight into the relationship between our most intimate, personal experiences, the industries that control them, and the social movements that resist the industrialisation of life and seek to birth change.
A man, a woman, and their biological children, all of the same race, the mythical "nuclear family" has been the bedrock of American cultural, religious, social, and economic life since the Revolutionary War, and even with all the changes we have absorbed in the last sixty years, it essentially remains so. Current trends in adoption, however, have begun to shift the dominant paradigm of the family in ways never before imagined. Professional estimates show that in the United States today, seven million families have been formed by adoption, and 700,000 of them are interracial. These still-growing numbers have begun to radically change the face of the traditional American family. Barbara Katz Rothman, a noted sociologist who has explored motherhood in four previous books and has more recently explored the social implications of the human genome project, now turns her eye toward race and family. Weaving together the sociological, the historical, and the personal, Barbara Katz Rothman looks at the contemporary American family through the lens of race, race through the lens of adoption, and all-family, race, and adoption-within the context of the changing meanings of motherhood. She asks urgent and provocative questions about children as commodities, about "trophy" children, about the impact of genetics, and about how these adopted children will find their racial, ethnic, or cultural identities Drawing on her own experience as the white mother of a black child, on historical research on white people raising black children from slavery to contemporary times, and pulling together work on race, adoption, and consumption, Rothman offers us new insights for understanding the way that race and family are shaped in America today. This book is compelling reading, not only for those interested in family and society, but for anyone grappling with the myriad issues that surround raising a child of a different race.
Too often, in the debate over reproductive rights and technologies, we lose sight of the fundamental emotional and psychological issues that define the experience of pregnancy. Robin Gregg here draws on the words and stories of over thirty women to provide a first- hand perspective on pregnancy in the modern age. In an age where a new advance in reproductive technology occurs seemingly every month, pregnancy has come to be defined by such medical procedures as prenatal screening, amniocentesis, fetal monitoring, induced labor, and cesarean sections. Public policymakers, ethicists, religious figures, and the medical establishment control the debate, drowning out the voices of women who grapple in the most immediate sense with the issues. Even feminist theorists often overlook the nuances and paradoxes of the reproductive revolution as experienced by individual, particular women. The reader follows these thirty women as they speak about whether to become pregnant, and by what means; how to choose a health provider; what meaning they attribute to their pregnancies; and how they navigate their way through the contradictory pressures they face during pregnancy. The intimate nature of Gregg's research, consisting as it does largely of women's pregnancy narratives, lends her book a vibrancy often lacking in academic writing about reproduction.
Are you your genes? De-Sequencing: Identity Work with Genes explores this perplexing question, showing how different forms of knowledge must be contextualized to become meaningful. It is generally assumed that the genomic sequence adds up to the identity-forming material life is made of. Yet identity cannot itself adopt the form of a sequence. As the authors in this volume show, the genome must be ‘de-sequenced’ by human language to render it interpretable and meaningful in a social context. The book unpacks this type of ‘sequence-speech’ in engaging detail, adopting a personal, social, cultural, and bio-political approach to examine the transformation of human identity and reflexivity in the era of genetic citizenship.
